***The Cool Cloud of Okayness was written amidst the skirmishes and shuffle of the seven years since her last song based album (although there has been a fascinating array of collaborations, tributes, rarities, and experiments released in the interim). Recorded by TJO at her home studio in Upper Ojai, California, a studio built on the ashes of the home lost to the Thomas Fire. Many of The Cool Cloud of Okayness’s nine tracks were developed in the time between the wildfire and the rebuilding, between lockdown and reopening. TJO, her partner (dancer, choreographer and frequent collaborator) Jmy James Kidd and their dog sheltered from the storms in the high desert of Southern California and the deep suburbs of Louisville, KY. In these locales were discovered the improvised bass guitar figures to Kidd’s dance which transformed into songs during pandemic isolation, then brought to the ensemble of drummer/percussionist Sheridan Riley (of Alvvays), multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements, and on a couple, guitarist Meg Duffy (of Hand Habits & Duffy x Uhlmann). They build and gleefully destroy and rebuild again. There is joy in the ensemble’s shared queer identity- an identity that refuses to be agreed upon. This record too challenges any easy genre or definition. This record is sculpture and portrait of times and loved ones gone past. It is spiritual and it is psychedelic. TJO’s deft production and rock-solid bass playing hold the center, and her spectral guitar and singing voice carry the message.
LP $20.35
04/26/2024
***A camera zooms in without crowding its subject. A song about someone else's damage helps you understand your own, and puts you on to new mysteries. Stars look like grains of sand. On Little Kid's new album and Orindal Records debut, A Million Easy Payments, the urgency in Kenny Boothby's voice matches the stakes of his lyrics, epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection. The band's lilting folk rock arrangements carry Boothby's stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedal steel, flute, and electric piano. It's a record of depression and frustration that doesn't stew in piety or aestheticize pain, that also explodes with life. Fragile and abundant. It's a record with blood in its veins. Little Kid is a Toronto-based collaborative project that has existed in some form since 2009, and is currently comprised of Brodie Germain (drums, guitar), Paul Vroom (bass), Megan Lunn (vocals, banjo, keyboard), Liam Cole (drums, percussion), and Kenny Boothby (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards). A Million Easy Payments, like the three Little Kid releases before it, was tracked, engineered, and mastered by Vroom. Vroom's work renders a portrait of Little Kid's twin musical strengths—as a live act, a straight-ahead folk rock outfit, and as a group of creative, independent producers who want to mess things up. To that end, the record features several guest instruments: Eliza Niemi's cello, Anh Phung's flute, Seth Engel's percussion, Peter Gill's...
LP $20.25
02/23/2024
MC $9.75
02/23/2024
***Rooms With Walls and Windows is the first album by singer, songwriter and guitarist Julie Byrne. Blending psychedelic and traditional folk elements, Julie Byrne creates a highly personal and quietly mystical world that echoes the early work of Leonard Cohen and Vashti Bunyan. Rooms With Walls and Windows' twelve tracks were collected from two limited edition cassette releases, recorded between 2011 and 2012 by Jake Acosta in Chicago, IL. Each song was recorded live, with Julie accompanying herself on fingerpicked acoustic guitar or keyboard. Rooms With Walls and Windows was lovingly remastered for vinyl by Owen Ashworth and Matthew Barnhart.
LP $18.50
11/03/2023
***Blurring the limits between speed and slowness, Meg Duffy (guitar) and Greg Uhlmann (guitar) communicate in velocities, underwriting each other’s peaks and flurries as they ache toward a mutual horizon. These one-take improvisations, recorded in Uhlmann’s brothers’ house on a borrowed tape recorder, unfold like a game of truth or dare. Their constant motif is an unceasing return, a steady heartbeat they mutually commit to, knowing when one wanders off, the other will either follow or call them home. Here, flushness overrides order, each note saunters by like initials etched into tree bark: a devotion both passing and eternal. After playing in Perfume Genius and Hand Habits, Duffy and Uhlmann embarked on their first record together, Doubles. A testament to the wordlessness of their musical intimacy, Duffy and Uhlmann take up the guitar in order to make an imprint of the slowness and presence of their improvisational practice. They weave together a sonic meditation, embracing intuition and relying on trust. Side A of Doubles consists of two guitars in conversation: looping feelings, braiding sound, blowing kisses, and finishing each other’s sentences. Less of an echo and more of nod, the songs unfold in radical, mutual witnessing. Refraining from any over dubs or edits on the final tracks, the immediacy of the compositions makes it feel like we are in the room with them.
LP $23.50
11/03/2023
***Ruth Garbus’s Alive People is a studio album full of underground anthems for sensitive people of all ages that happened to be recorded in a club with an audience of a hundred. In between the compositions are interstitial improvisations that happened on stage during the performance. These are not presented in sequence. It’s not a lesser copy of a moving experience. It’s an echoing recreation, traveling- out photons bent thru and into a pastel rainbow. Ruth was joined on stage at different points by collaborators: elie mcafee-hahn on synth and bass, Julie Bodian on atypical guitars, Julia Tadlock on voice and presence. Nick Bisceglia engineered, with Ruth’s two vocal mics taped together, the room split to its mid and sides, the pop filter a matte circle in front of the shimmering curtain.
LP $23.50
11/03/2023
***Mia Gargaret is an ambient, (mostly) instrumental album by Chicago, IL singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist & producer Gia Margaret. Mia Gargaret was not the follow-up album that Gia intended to release after the critical success of her 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer. But after she suddenly found herself without use of her primary instrument, she had to rethink her methods, at least temporarily. Gia explains: “After having to cancel tours because of illness, I was unable to sing for nearly half of the year. This left me feeling like a shell of myself, so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort. These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker. At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.” Without singing or lyrics to steal the focus, the instrumental tracks on Mia Gargaret shine a light on Gia Margaret’s skills as a musician, composer & producer. Spare but immersive arrangements of synthesizer, piano & acoustic guitar simultaneously ache & soothe, building emotional landscapes that rise & recede like scenery through a train window. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful, which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process. I was making music to self-soothe. I had synth loops going while I walked around my apartment, forming my own daily soundtrack.”
LP $23.50
11/03/2023
***Twenty-eight years into her kaleidoscopic discography, Songs for Peacock is the first album singer/guitarist/composer Tara Jane O’Neil has credited to just her initials: TJO. Recorded at home using primitive electronic instruments in addition to heavily effected electric guitar, bass & voice, Songs for Peacock is a collection of pop covers recalled from TJO’s youth, intended as a “mixtape” for her late brother Brian. Over twelve tracks & thirty-nine minutes, Songs for Peacock abstracts radio hits by the likes of Boy George, Bananarama, Leonard Cohen, Siouxsie and the Banshees & INXS, distilling earworms into thin wisps of dreamlike atmosphere, or stretching them into languorous psychedelic soundscapes. Songs for Peacock warps our collective musical memory to form a singular & cohesive body of work that defines TJO’s highly personal sonic landscape.
LP $21.95
11/03/2023